Readers in the free world may be brought up short amid the literary pleasures of this novel by a Nobel Prize-winning poet. Are they sufficiently honoring the peace and freedom denied to the characters seen here in World War II Poland? Or are they, like the Americans observed by Milosz in another book, using their distance from the upheavals of history for no more than the equivalent of watching TV in a bar? Whatever the answer, a Western reader has to feel a humbling admiration for the depicted resisters of Nazi and then Soviet tyranny, precursors of the Solidarity heroes whose second anniversary was celebrated last month. (August) And what of those who gave up resisting then - or now? Milosz fascinatingly explores the characters able to rationalize compliance with a repressive regime. Here, for example, is a writer forced into a pact with the communist devil, accepting a printing press from the authorities, trying to place conditions on the selling of his soul, bleakly imagining the dark years ahead. It is a brief, telling fictional -vignette to accompany the analysis of artists snared by Stalinism for which Milosz's ''The Captive Mind'' is known.