A member of the Petrashevsky Circle, Palm in 1847 was arrested, spent 8 months in the Petropavlovsk Fortress, had his death sentence changed to deportation and served 7 years in the Russian Army.

[1] Alexander Ivanovich Palm was born in Krasnoslobodsk, Penza region, son of a provincial state official and a serf peasant woman.

According to an inscription made by a secret police official on Palm's personal file, dated 29 April 1849: "His confession is well-written, but... he never reveals, rather tries to conceal Petrashevsky's criminal intentions.

In 1871, now a manager of a financial control office in Poltava, Palm embezzled 17 thousand rubles that he had taken from public funds and was sentenced to 3 years of exile.

Włodzimierz Spasowicz, a renowned lawyer who defended Palm, never disputed the fact of the embezzlement, but stressed the dire financial circumstances in which the once well-known writer had found himself.

Palm's best known poetic drama, The Tale of Tsar, Tsarina and Guslyar with a Cat from the Overseas (1843) was similar to Lermontov's The Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov.