Lewis A. Convis

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LEWIS A. CONVIS
REDPATH



LEWIS A. CONVIS
LEWIS A. CONVIS, noted traveler and lecturer, is one of the most popular speakers on the Lyceum platform today.  Eloquent, forceful, magnetic, he presents his worth-while ideas with brilliant logic and compelling conviction.

He has traveled in many parts of the world and has mingled with many races of people.  He has observed their modes of living, their struggle for happiness and wisdom, both in days of peace and also when strife and turmoil were rampant.  His years of study and observation and his native insight, supplemented by his wide personal experience, have given to him a rare understanding of the subjects he discusses.

For more than a decade, Mr. Convis has been a close student of Poland and Russia, and has had intimate contact with Polish and Russian peasants and upper classes both in America and Europe.  He has lived, not only among the Poles and the Russians, but among the Kerghis, Mongols and Buriats; has traveled extensively in Japan and China and has been in Straits Settlements, India, Arabia, Egypt, Spain, England, Denmark, Germany, Czecho-Slovakia and France.

Particularly illuminating were his experiences with the famous Polish Legion of Siberia, which he joined as a civilian worker in 1918.  The Polish Legion was then composed of about 16,000 men and formed one of the Allied armies in Siberia supporting the Kolchak government.  After the downfall of Kolchak, the Legion held the rear guard for the entire Allied armies in retreat before the Bolsheviki across Siberia.  The Legion was cut to pieces, and Mr. Convis was one of the 870 survivors who escaped by taking to the forests.  With his Polish orderly he made a 3,000-mile flight across Siberia in winter.

Mr. Convis is now pastor of an important Chicago church.

Lewis A. Convis is a versatile thinker.  In addition to his well-known lectures on Russia, he speaks upon a widely different subject, An Adventure in Happiness,—a frank, inspiring discussion of genuine happiness, which is of practical benefit to all.

This season Mr. Convis is offering a new lecture entitled The Tragedy of the Closed Mind.  This lecture gives a keen analysis of the psychological basis for new ideas.  It offers a powerful antidote to the danger of closing the mind to sound progressive concepts.

Mr. Convis is especially in demand for teachers' institutes.




LECTURE SUBJECTS
Mr. Convis has a broad range of interests and just as broad a range of lecture subjects.  Whether he lectures on Russia and her problems, or discusses subjects arising from his study of the questions which make for individual success and happiness, he is equally interesting and always informative.

A Convis lecture is sure to be a feature attraction.

Here are some of his subjects:

UNDER THE PAWS OF THE RUSSIAN BEAR
CINDERELLA IN THE HOUSE OF LIFE
THE SOUL OF RUSSIA
POLAND, A STORY OF NATIONAL IDEALISM
IN THE LAND OF SNOWS AND PINES
THE TRAGEDY OF THE CLOSED MIND
AN ADVENTURE IN HAPPINESS—An An Inspirational Address



MR. CONVIS in Siberian Winter Costume





Striking Russian Scene As Described by Lewis A. Convis
Reprinted from The Lyceum News

I WAS stationed one night in the little village of Kainsk in Western Siberia.  It was September; the first tingle of a coming winter was in the air.  Some of the Polish boys quartered in the village had come over to enjoy the comforts of our club.  I was lonesome, homesick—as a man will be who hasn't seen his own kind or heard his own language for weeks at a time, and I walked out on those vast Siberian plains.

As I walked, I saw down the track the flicker of a firelight, and I knew that some refugees were cooking their evening meal.  As I drew nearer, I heard the sound of singing—wonderful singing!  (You must go to Russia if you would hear the human voice at its best; they all sing there; they all sing with marvelous beauty.)  I heard a song of the Volga river, a song of home and loved ones.  Then the melody changed; it was a song of the Ural mountains, a song of mother's love and little children playing around the doorstep.

As I came still nearer, I could see an old woman bending over a blackened can, stirring the soup.  The firelight flickered on her furrowed and careworn face, and her gray hair hung in dank, wet strings about her shrunken cheeks; but she was singing.  Opposite to her was a young girl, of seventeen or eighteen, and two boys—singing.  A little refugee family, lost, homeless—wanderers on those vast Siberian plains.  Yet in the darkness and the storm they sang of home and loved ones!

As I watched that little group, I thought, That is Russia today; lost, a refugee among the nations—no star in her sky to guide her, the clouds of misery and despair hanging black and low over the land, while the winds of famine and revolt blow the rain of sorrow and suffering into her face.  Lost, refugee!  Yet in the darkness and the night Russia sings and waits for her new day.  And I beg you—you who live here in this country of ours, with its orderly government and its stable ways—when you grow impatient with her because she does not more quickly solve her problems; when in the future you grow restless with her because she does not set her house in order and return to the paths of righteousness, justice, and peace; remember this little Siberian scene.  Be patient with Russia, I beg of you, and sympathetic.  For Russia is lost and leaderless.  In this, her supreme hour, she has but feeble hands to guide her; in this, her great crisis, she has no one to show her the way.  But yet she sings—sings and waits with an infinite, Slavic patience for the leader who must rise from her ranks to guide her to the sunrise of her new day.  Then again the golden melody of art and music and literature, which even now wells up within her mystic soul, will once more burst bonds and overflow the world.