Analysis of data presented in the literature and results of unique studies revealed that nonlocalized fatigue damage of metals and alloys, which manifests itself in the initiation and propagation of a large number of microcracks distributed arbitrarily in the bulk of the material, can be considered with the use of the characteristics of inelastic deformation such as inelastic strain and inelastic strain energy per cycle. The author studied the nature of the material inelasticity and methods of its investigation. Analysis has been made of the hysteresis loop shape, width, and area, as well as of the main regularities of inelastic deformation of metals and alloys.Keywords: nonlocalized fatigue damage, inelastic strain, inelastic strain energy.Introduction. The process of fatigue of metals and alloys can be divided into two stages: the stage of nonlocalized fatigue damage and that of localized fatigue damage where the process of fatigue is defined by the propagation of the dominant crack that leads to final fracture.As numerous investigations showed, the stage of the fatigue crack initiation is longer lasting than the stage of its propagation. Figure 1 shows the results of generalization of some of those investigations performed in [1], which are presented in the form of the relation between the ratio of the number of cycles to the initiation of a fatigue crack of length about 0.05 mm under axial loading of smooth specimens from various materials to the number of cycles to fracture and the number of cycles to fracture.It is seen that under high-cycle fatigue, which corresponds to the number of cycles to fracture equal to 10 5 and more, the stage of the fatigue crack initiation accounts for more than 90% of the total number of cycles to fracture.In the case of the fatigue fracture in the presence of stress concentration, fretting, etc., the stage of crack initiation is of shorter duration, yet it remains dominating.The size of a fatigue crack corresponding to the transition from the stage of nonlocalized to the stage of localized fatigue damage depends on the material structure, the level of acting stresses, loading regime, stress state type, and other factors. The size of such a crack generally decreases with increasing strength of the alloy and increases in torsion as compared with tension-compression [2,3].Thus, in [3] for steel 45 (σ u = 516 MPa) it is shown that, at stresses equal to the fatigue limit for the test duration 10 7 cycles, the size of the maximum crack in tension-compression and in torsion is 0.05 and 0.17 mm, respectively, and for 12KhN3A steel of higher strength (σ u = 950 MPa), it is 0.03 and 0.08, respectively. These crack dimensions are close to those used for plotting the relation in Fig. 1.