In the collection of card games of 1826, a description of solitaire The Turkish shawl begins like this: "Among the very few layouts in one deck, this occupies not the last place with its entertainment, giving the case to the decomposer to use some attention to unraveling the predicament of the cards, and to get out of it through special foresight". Contemporaries of the poet A. S. Pushkin and Emperor Nicholas the First, and maybe they themselves, were puzzling over this solitaire.