Alternate reality of Wastelands in the Sarah Brooks' novel "The Cautious Traveller's Guide to The Wastelands" regarding to philosophy of the Anthropocene

The purpose of the work is to consider the artistic reality of the novel "The Cautious Traveller's Guide to The Wastelands" (2024) by the modern British writer Sarah Brooks in terms of representing the conflict between man and nature. The work of this author for the first time in domestic and foreign literary criticism becomes the object of analysis, which ensures the novelty of this work. The subject of the study is the correlation of the world of the Wastelands, an alternative territory of Siberia closed from the heroes of the novel, with modern ecological and ecocritical concepts of J. Lovelock, D. Haraway, M. Serres, E. Biczyk, C. Hamilton and others, which are devoted to rethinking the hierarchical relationship between humanity, historically perceiving itself as an actor, and the environment, diachronically conceivable as the object, the field of application of human force. This work was carried out using the optics of the cross-disciplinary research field of the Anthropocene, initially perceived as the geological era, characterized by an increased degree of human interference in the natural world, and now - as a phenomenon associated with the anthropogenic factor and its influence on the outside world. The Wastelands are a self-organizing dynamic system evolving without regard to human desire as a response to anthropogenic interference with natural balance and harmony. Penetrating into its territory with the help of an alternative version of the Trans-Siberian Railway, built by a British company in the middle of the 19th century, the heroes of the S. Brooks' novel, colliding in the unknown, can act in two ways: either cling to the past, which is a subject-object form of interaction with the outside world, and die, or make contact with the Other, abandoning the anthropocentric paradigm of worldview, and in this case return to a state of harmony with nature. The writer demonstrates that only readiness for dialogue and the adoption of not only a different form of life, but also oneself as its organic part, can prolong the existence of mankind on Earth.