Finite and infinite in literature of the transition epoch (in memoriam professor N.S. Leites)

The review of creative works written by the specialist in Germanic studies, theorist of the XXth century novel, professor of Foreign Literature department of Perm State University from 1963 to 1992 Natalya Samoilovna Leites (1921-2011) is carried out in the aspect of transitivity of literary epochs, the crisis of consciousness at the turn of the century. The antithesis "life-death" and its variations in the German novel of the 20-s of the XXth century and in German literature of the Modern Age are regarded. It is proved that the acute for Soviet and Post Soviet literary studies problem of method (realism and social realism, modernism and postmodernism) did not move aside the problem of poetics of genre, object and subject organization of the novel in the works written by N.S. Leites. The central for the approach of the researcher, whose outlook formed in the Second World War, "man-world" correlation is characterized by dialectics of concrete-historical and panhuman (novels of direct and indirect depiction), individual (finite) and universal (infinite).